New Features in WoltLab Suite 5.2: Thread Forms, Best Answer, and more Improvements
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WoltLab -
May 30, 2019 at 12:09 PM -
36,621 Views -
19 Comments
Custom Thread Input Fields
Categories and sub-forums are great options for structuring topics but depending on the context, additional information is either helpful or required for answering questions. WoltLab Suite Forum 5.2 offers a relevant new feature for this scenario: custom thread input fields. These fields are displayed at the top of the form to start a new thread and are to be filled out by the user. After the thread is created, the entered values are listed before the actual message of the thread.
The input fields are set up per forum so that you can require users to enter different information depending on the context of the forum.
There are different types of input fields you can choose from, for example, a simple yes/no selection or multiline text, and you can also set whether the input field has to be filled out or whether it is optional.
Best Answers
Forums generally deal with two types of threads: Those that discuss contemporary matters and those that aim at a solution for a problem or a question. The upcoming version of WoltLab Suite Forum improves the user experience for Question & Answer style threads by introducing a new feature that lets the thread starter mark one answer as the “best answer”. In addition to its normal position within the post list of the thread, the best answer will also be shown directly below the first post of the thread.
Stop Forum Spam
Spam is the scourge of the internet and any successful community has historically became a target of those rogue users. WoltLab Suite 5.2 extends the existing set of powerful tools with another proven and reliable layer of defense: Stop Forum Spam. The detection works by matching the username, IP address and email address of new users against a local database with known sources of spam. For each of these three data points, you can set whether it should be used for detection and also set the weight you want them to play when determining whether the checked user is a suspected spammer.
As you are using the information of your newly registered users to detect spammers, data privacy is relevant. The detection process does not send any information to third parties, WoltLab and Stop Forum Spam included, and uses checksums to detect matches. To achieve this data-sensitive comparison, Stop Forum Spam’s data is processed and optimized on our servers which saves you storage space and processing power.
After installing or updating to WoltLab Suite 5.2, a local database is built on your webserver in the background based on the data on our servers. New data is added and old data is removed periodically.
Once a user has been flagged as a potential spam account, you can let their registration be immediately rejected or require manual approval by an administrator. Users that have been flagged have a dedicated icon next to their username in the user list in the admin panel.
Global Modification Log
Modifications to threads and posts, for example, are already logged in the current version and specific modification logs can be accessed in the frontend via the relevant modified content. With version 5.2, we have added a new global modification log in the admin panel that provides an overview of all modifications accross all installed packages that support modification logs.
The modification log list can be filtered by the user responsible for the modification, the modification action (which also supports filtering by all actions from a package), and the time interval in which the modification occurred.
Delete User’s Content
The best protection against spam might not be enough in rare situations and a spammer might start new threads, posts on existing threads, or comment on events and images. Deleting the content of a user is now much easier: The user list in the admin panel offers a new “Delete User’s Content” option that opens a dialog in which you can select the content to delete.
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